Thursday 3/8/2018 Defeating the Strong Man

Most of my life I have tended to skip over portions of Scripture like today’s Gospel.  I have dismissed what it says as “the ancients’ understanding” of mental and physical illness.  In my mind, people didn’t understand things like epilepsy or schizophrenia, so they labeled such illnesses as being afflicted by a demon. When Scripture says Jesus “cast out demons,” what it really meant was that Jesus healed people of an illness. I did not believe demons are real.

Church Teaching on Demons

This is not what our church teaches.  Our church teaches that before the fall of man, there was the fall of Satan and some other angels.  These spiritual creatures were originally good angels, created spiritual beings who served God.  But they were jealous of God and rebelled.  They “became evil of their own doing.” (CCC 391)  Of their own free choice, these spiritual creatures “radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign.” (CCC 392) They are the source of evil in our world.

Actually, Jesus came to destroy the works of Satan. He came to destroy the power of evil in our world. (CCC  394-395)  He did that by his life, death, and resurrection.

Today’s Gospel

I see that now as the meaning of today’s Gospel.  Jesus drove out a demon—something he did frequently.  People then accused him of driving out demons by “the power of Beelzebul,” the prince of demons.  While scholars disagree about exactly who Beelzebul was, the context in this passage is that he is of Satan, of the devil.

Was Jesus acting as the devil to drive out devils—what he was accused of here?  Jesus makes quick work of that logic: “Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste and house will fall against house.  And if Satan is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?”  He adds a second good question:  “If I, then, drive out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your own people drive them out?”

Then Jesus goes on to say something that is very important for us today:

“But if it is by the finger of God that I drive out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you.  When a strong man fully armed guards his palace, his possessions are safe.  But when one stronger than he attacks and overcomes him, he takes away the armor on which he relied and distributes the spoils.  Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.”

Satan is the strong man.  Jesus is the Stronger Man.

Jesus came to DEFEAT evil.  He is the Stronger Man.

Applications to Here and Now

How does this apply to me, to you?  It is easy to take a reassurance application:  “Jesus came to defeat the Evil One.  He is God.  He is stronger.  No matter what is going on around me, I can feel safe because of that. Eventually God will make it all right in the world.”

That application seems legitimate.  But, as I read, study, question, and listen for God to give me understanding, I do not hear God saying, “Relax, I’ve got it all taken care of.” That is not the meat of this passage for me today.

Instead my mind goes to an experience I had last Friday.

I have always struggled with forgiveness.  I determined as Lent began to more deeply forgive some past hurts, using a healing prayer method within Confession.  The method was to name the hurtful events one by one and say “I forgive…”, while imaginatively visualizing the events and choosing to give the resulting stones in my heart to Father who acted as Jesus as I named them.  I had prepared—I thought.  But in the power of the Sacrament and the Holy Spirit, something deeper happened.  I discovered in the naming, that the evil done to me had influenced and limited me in serious ways I had never realized.  True, I had not retaliated or passed on the evil.  But I had buried it within and held on to it.  I suddenly saw how that holding had created sin in me .  As I moved from saying “I forgive” to owning the effects, words I had not intended to say poured out of me with a ring of Truth that was profoundly freeing.

It was painful.  It was deep.  It was powerful.  It was like a river of God poured through me and washed me clean of stains I did not even know I had.  The strong man hidden in me was defeated by the Stronger Man in the sacrament.

Baptism and the Strong Man

Then I recall that at baptism—and every Easter—we make the baptismal promises.  “Do you reject Satan?”  “And all his works?”  “And all his empty promises?”  Those statements are actually seen by the Church as “simple exorcisms,” plain, straight-forward rejections of Satan and the power of evil. (CCC 1237)  The Church, in her sacraments, gives us tools for letting the Stronger Man claim us.

In Baptism we are claimed for Christ.  Baptism “signifies and actually brings about death to sin and entry into the life of the Most Holy Trinity.” (CCC 1239) In a very real way, each person baptized during the Easter vigil is having Satan cast out.

And, as was true for me last Friday, each time we make “a good confession,” the strong man is cast out by the Stronger Man.

Evil and The Will

Our parish uses Everyone’s Stations of the Cross  when we say the Stations before the fish fry each Friday during Lent.  The words of Christ for the Ninth Station, The Third Fall, come to mind:

“Completely drained of strength, I lie, collapsed, upon the cobblestones.  My body cannot move.  No blows, no kicks, can rouse it up.

And yet my will is mine.  And so is yours.

Know this, my other self.  Your body may be broken, but no force on earth and none in hell can take away your will.  Your will is yours.”

Temptations—whether they are to do overt, recognized evil—or to bury evil inside where it influences you in hidden ways—or to accept the evil you see around you as normal—or to pretend evil doesn’t exist—temptations are Satan’s way to lie and trap our wills.

Jesus saved us from evil—our own and the evil done to us by others.  But it takes our will to let Christ claim us and cast the demon out.

Evil and Forgiveness

On Tuesday Bob Garvey talked about forgiveness as “something that is impossible for human beings to do.”  Forgiveness is an act of the will.  It is not a feeling.  Feelings come, but forgiveness is not about feeling better, at peace.  Forgiveness is about choosing to let the Stronger Man bind the strong man in your life.

When you forgive, you stop the power of evil.  I thought if I simply didn’t do to somebody what was done to me, I had stopped evil, had forgiven enough.

Today I see that differently:  we as Christians bind the strong man here and now when we cast the evil out by an action of the will.  We can do that through confession, through various forms of healing prayer, through Scripture study and Christian community, through simple choices to turn not only the other cheek, but the other way—to do what Jesus did any time we encounter evil.  But we must choose to listen to God instead of to the strong man.

Our will must move toward the Stronger Man, toward Jesus.

This week’s Lenten theme across the readings seems to be “examine yourself for the quieter sins.” The daily Scripture readings name them:  dismissing the messages of God, unforgiveness, not accepting our circumstances in life, growing lax in keeping God’s commands, not loving both God and neighbor, pride.

Listen to God and let the Stronger Man name these sins as they are in you.  Use your will to call to Jesus to cast them out.  Give them to Jesus.  He already accepted them when his will chose the cross.  The strong man has been defeated already. Claim it in your life.

Prayer:

Thank you, Lord, for inspiring my will, accepting my sorrow, washing my heart, and freeing me from evil in a new and wonderful way.  Now fill me with your Holy Spirit that I may remain clean of heart.  Lead me, guide me, Lord.

Selection from “Everyone’s Way of the Cross,” by Clarence Enzler.  Notre Dame, Indiana:  Ave Maria Press, 1986.

CCC stands for Catechism of the Catholic Church.  The numbers refer to paragraphs within the Catechism.

About the Author

Mary Ortwein lives in Frankfort, Kentucky in the US. A convert to Catholicism in 1969, Mary had a deeper conversion in 2010. She earned a theology degree from St. Meinrad School of Theology in 2015. Now an Oblate of St. Meinrad, Mary takes as her model Anna, who met the Holy Family in the temple at the Presentation. Like Anna, Mary spends time praying, working in church settings, and enjoying the people she meets. Though formally retired, Mary continues to work part-time as a marriage and family therapist and therapy supervisor. A grandmother and widow, she divides the rest of her time between facilitating small faith-sharing groups, writing, and being with family and friends. Earlier in her life, Mary worked avidly in the pro-life movement. In recent years that has taken the form of Eucharistic ministry to Carebound and educating about end-of-life matters. Now, as Respect for Human Life returns to center stage, she seeks to find ways to communicate God's love and Lordship for all--from the moment of conception through the moment we appear before Jesus when life ends.

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19 Comments

  1. Thank you, Mary, for reminding me this morning that Jesus has already freed me from the bondage of sin. Your story about the stones and forgiveness, to me, was very moving and powerful.

  5. Mary, Such deep thought into the Lenten theme this week opens my mind with new thoughts and realizations. Incredible. Thank you

  7. Thank you, Mary, for your powerful insights. Would you be able to provide greater detail on the healing prayer method you were referencing? It would be helpful.

  8. As anonymous suggested would you provide an example or two of the words your deeper brought out. I’m looking for personal details, just what did your deeper confession look like and do for you. I think I need it for myself. Thank you.

  10. Oops. So many missing words. I’m NOT looking for personal details.
    My brain is faster than my fingers.

  11. Thank you so much for this meditation and for all the beautiful work you do for God, using Anna as your example.

  13. Questions this morning are great! A couple of clarifications. Healing prayer as I was doing it in confession was not deliverance prayer, nor was it exorcism. I let go of evil, but it was evil from the wound–not a spirit attached. Whenever there is a wound from life, the experience literally “brands” the brain. Information coming into the mind and soul is often filtered by the memory of the event. This “learning” from the trauma or evil has potential to leave a person less capable of living in the fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control). There are many possible effects. One is a “hardening of the heart.” We protect ourselves and close ourselves off. There are many other responses–it is the stuff much of therapy is made of. Over the past twenty years as a therapist I have come to believe more and more in the necessity and power of forgiveness (received and given) to literally erase the effects of trauma and evil and to repair family relationships. I have also sought healing prayer from others.

    There are many models of healing prayer out there. I have received healing prayer through some people trained in the Christian Healing Ministries model. However, the process of healing I used last Friday was a combination of their model and some of my therapist background.

    I am willing to give some more details of my experience, but it will take a bit of thinking and praying to give what is helpful to others while maintaining my privacy. I will have answers about that as a response to this post by in the morning. Blessings, all!

    Mary Ortwein

  15. Thank you, Mary, for all your reflections that are very grounded in theological literature. Very educational, and as such, very inspiring. I agree with the commenter above, who said this reflection was the best one yet. Your story about your healing experience through confession was beautiful!

    May the Lord bless you and your loved ones, and may He continue to enrich your Lenten journey.

  17. So great. Profound.
    Thanks to the Holy Spirit who always inspires your thoughts as you write, Mary!
    Praise God!

    God Bless!

  18. The best way I know to be helpful to those who may want to do something similar to what I did with confession, while respecting privacy, is to give a description of the process I used as well as a general description of the context.

    For some months there has been a sense of separation between me and some of my very good (and very holy) friends. That separation has legitimate roots in differences that are developing in our spiritualities, ministries, perspectives, and politics. It has been very painful. I recognized that this sense of separation in me was experienced as a sense of wall, of hardness of heart. As Lent began I had honest, respectful conversations with my friends. I admitted my hardness of heart, asked them for forgiveness and gave forgiveness to them. But that did not fix things at a deep level. I recognized in myself that Pavlov’s rules were working in my life. You might remember Pavlov, his dog, and his pairing of food with a bell. Then, later, he could ring the bell and the dog would salivate as if he were eating. A similar thing happens when there is trauma. If there is a similarity of situation or any sensory data, people who have experienced trauma react like Pavlov’s dog: they over generalize their learning and see in a current event situation something of the past and respond to the past situation, rather than the current event. This is seen in post-traumatic stress disorder when soldiers who have been in combat react to any loud noise. It is also in ordinary situations when, if we have a very bad meal at a restaurant, we don’t ever want to go back. I knew at least a part of the wall in current relationships (and subsequent judging attitudes on my part) came from the past. That is a cue for both confession and some kind of healing activity. I chose to use healing prayer because that would put God in the middle of it all.

    I made an appointment with my confessor, who knows me well. I explained that I wanted to do healing prayer and confession at the same time. He knew the current event situation and knows healing prayer, at least in general. He was good with my request. Before the appointment I made a list of the events from childhood that would seem to feed my hardness of heart. As part of the confession I used a strategy that I have used with people in families who have need to forgive each other. That was to put imaginary rocks in Father’s hand each time I named another event and said, “I forgive.” There were events from childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. I’m not sure if I had confessed all of these situations before, but probably most of them.

    What happened was that sometime in the middle of the naming, awareness in me developed of a poisonous level of resentment, anger, and repulsion buried deep in me. With that awareness, my language changed. I no longer said, “I forgive.” I began to name what I had done and not done in response to the evil done to me. I began to own my part in the path that evil had taken in my life in some critical family events. I named sins of my own. At the same time, God gave me clarity at understanding that some things I have felt guilty about for years were not what happened. The biography of my life changed because my understanding changed.

    Father’s response was to say he was putting all others’ sins and my own into the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to melt them into lava, which could become a road for me now to walk on. It was the perfect thing for Jesus to do with all our sins.

    There were many tears and my brain was cotton for the rest of the day. But there was also immediately a tremendous sense of relief, of lightness, of light, and of peace. I am at total peace with my friends, God, and myself. Since last Friday there have been many thoughts, questions, etc. Still, peace, energy, joy–all the fruits of the Spirit are very much within me.

    I hope this helps those of you who want to know more. Blessings,
    Mary Ortwein

  19. Thank you Mary for sharing such a personal experience. You have given us another bit of truth. It sets me free to resolve to find a way for me to forgive and possibly experience the peace found only in the depths of our Lord! Amen!

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